RESOURCES

Traditionally, High-Volume / High-Speed personalized print applications, such as billing statements, were in the classical transactional space. Many TransPromo applications were also based on classical or legacy transactional workflows (mainly characterized by the use of IPDS / AFP / IJPDS as print workflow protocols.)

With the advancements in print technology, introducing top quality color and a rich selection of substrates, together with high speed and high duty cycles, the door to attractive direct mail and modern transpromo applications became wide open. Advancements in DFE and RIP technologies also enabled the driving of such high-end inkjet and toner-based devices through the powerful PDF /VT (and similar) print workflows.

And this opened the door to leveraging XMPie software in such applications, making the inclusion of creatively compelling documents, and highly flexible design-to-production workflows possible.

We recently had a webinar covering the spectrum of High-Volume / High-Speed applications with XMPie software.

The webinar consisted of two parts: a customer case study, and a “Pearls-of-Wisdom” session focusing on XMPie software and how to best use it.

For the case study Scott Bramley from TCW Solutions shared their experience in creating a beautifully designed highly personalized pension plan document for a large UK insurance company. Scott’s session conveyed clearly the value of being able to use Adobe technology not only for achieving a compelling pension plan document, but also for having an highly efficient design-to-production workflow. Key highlights:

Creative without compromise.

Revisions and changes are always possible, including just before production. Being able to stay within the InDesign document template all the way through and never being required to convert it to some production-friendly format, is the key to these efficiencies.

No surprise color and document reproduction (WYSIWYG)

Repeat workflows – processing the job with new data, for instance, are also simple and streamlined, especially because the Design Template, the Variability Rules, and the Data are only linked at composition time, on-demand.

Scott emphasized that moving to a server-class solution from XMPie enabled TCW Solutions to gain dramatic improvements in overall composition time for the job as well as relieving their desktop stations to do further preparations for other jobs.

The section on the XMPie technology had two parts.

In the first one, we explained a few important capabilities of the software, especially for demanding High-Volume / High-Speed applications. These focused mainly on XMPie software’s Auto-scale ability whereby job processing will leverage a high degree of concurrent parallel processing across all cores of a given server as well as automatically scale up to use other extension servers (if they are part of the processing cluster). We also highlighted that the resulting output stream (the PDF/VT file) is highly compact and efficient, saving time on communicating it to the RIP and shortening RIP time due to optimally defined reusable objects.

In the second part we covered quite a few insights on how to design for variable – what to do, what to avoid, and how to achieve certain effects in ways that will be non-compromising creatively and still highly efficient in composition time and overall compactness of the PDF/VT output stream. These included insight on the right way of using layers and when to avoid them, how to manage transparency effects in order to avoid over taxing of the PDF/VT and the RIP, and how to make sure that placed variable content, such as images, are reusable and without introducing excessive file sizes.

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Email Form Submission Terms

We will keep you updated with what's happening in XMPie through webinar invitations, newsletters and announcements.Note: all XMPie emails contain an unsubscribe option for stopping future communications. If you would like to opt-out now, please write to optout@xmpie.com.